RachelWatch: Sick Puppies

On Friday, President Obama and former President George H.W. Bush both spoke at Texas A&M on the importance of community organizing. Bush felt moved to write an open letter to the A&M community asking them to maybe chill out on the protesting for the day, as the whole point was about service, not politics.

In an interview about this gracious gesture, however, Bush did manage to call Rachel and Keith Olbermann “sick puppies”. Which was uncalled-for, but I can see where it might be hard to have perspective about people who take a hard line on fact-checking your son.

Especially when you’re not used to the media doing that very often.

Jiffy Populism

Everybody all scrubbed off from Thursday’s Tim Phillips interview? You might want to get your loofahs fired up again.

Rachel noted that Americans for Prosperity had been claiming that a speaker at one of their events wasn’t one of their speakers and wasn’t at their event.

Rachel decided to introduce them to this newfangled thing you might have heard of called “video footage.”

Good as Goldman

Oh, dear. There certainly are a lot of former Goldman Sachs employees are working in financial oversight capacities for the government.

And current employees are talking to government workers on the phone at all hours of the night and sharing secret decoder rings and totally going over their text message limits writing “U R 2 kewl” and “I <3 $$$” back and forth.

It kind of makes me want to indict absolutely everybody and just start over from scratch. Except that then we’d need some people who know about finance to oversee it.

Ms. Information

Rachel reported that after six attacks in 11 days, the Pakistan Taliban was oddly concerned about its image. They released a statement that “…if the media does not stop portraying us as terrorists … we will blow up offices of journalists and media organizations.”

I can’t decide whether that confirms my suspicion that people involved in radical religious movements tend to lack a sense of humor or completely destroys it.

I hope some news group is bold enough to release a statement that they wouldn’t have done all those offending stories if the Taliban had stopped calling them media organizations.

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America released a chilling report that female soldiers are at an enormous risk of sexual harassment and assault from their own colleagues. The Pentagon was stunned by those numbers, which somehow wrote themselves on a Pentagon report, which is where IAVA got them.

GOP in Exile

Rachel brought us up to date on Sarah Palin’s efforts to help her fellow Republicans get elected to positions that they may or may not quit halfway through.

Republicans have strong chances in the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia (great jumping catfish, PULL IT TOGETHER, VIRGINIA!) but so far they have not pulled out the big guns by asking Palin to help out. Which is odd, because her big guns come mounted on helicopters.

Palin has been invited to Texas by her soulmate in awesome hair Governor Rick Perry, who would like Palin’s help in the Republican primary against Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (also R — also Texas).

I think it’s a terrific plan. If there’s one thing Texans like, it’s someone from way out of state coming in to tell them what they should do.

Moment of Geek

If there’s a rabbit leaving brightly colored objects on your front lawn, he may not be the Easter Bunny. Think twice before scooping anything into your basket.

OK, for real, though: The silly-sounding issue of radioactive rabbit waste points to the much larger and quite serious issue of dealing with our radioactive nuclear waste.